David Balfe
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

THE SONG AND ITS MOMENT.

You’re driving home late at night, alone, when one of those perfect songs comes on the radio. It’s one of your all-time faves but you don’t have it in your record collection. You only catch it accidentally like this every five or ten years. (Which I’ve increasingly decided, in this whatever-you-want-whenever-you-want-it world, is the best way to hear your favourite songs.) The song tells the tale of another guy driving alone, but he isn’t travelling the rainy motorways of dull old England, he’s trailing across the dusty plains of some fabled American territory out of an old western movie.

Wichita, is it even a real place?

In my mind’s eye this lonely man in his lonely job wanders the prairies, now devoid of Hollywood cowboys leaving only a trail of telegraph poles and their wires singing in the wind. In his battered old pickup he does his job dutifully day after day after day. And, like me in my car that dark night, with the great expanse of the earth all around, his mind turns to greater thoughts than the everyday. Thoughts of love and our loved ones, of the ineffable nature of our feelings, and, most of all, of our tiny place in the grand enormity of things.

And the saccharine genius of the orchestra’s strings conjures up all that you’d ever want from a pop song and more, clutching and tugging at your heart. The underplayed, boy-next-door, middle-of-the-road quality of the voice brings out far more of the immense power of the song’s narrative than a more dramatic or supposedly soulful singer could ever achieve. And, as you drive on through the English night, you experience a moment where you magically commune with something transcendant, the oceanic feeling, the great big magnificent oneness of it all, that we so rarely reach and can never hold on to for more than a few seconds.

Such a song was this, such a record was this, such a singer was he.

David Balfe

Written by